台州博客 http://blog.0576city.com/ 台州博客,台州博客网,博客 Oblog 3.0 0576city@163.com <![CDATA[烧烤]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/夜风来袭/archives/2007/200742614321.html 夜风来袭 2007-4-26 14:03:00 上个星期六，和几个同事一起出去去烧烤，地点在一个水库边，好久没出去烧烤或野餐了，记得在初三的时候和同学一起出去搞过野餐，平常工作忙 ，压力大，这次真的很想出去放松放松，一天玩下来，虽然很累，但感觉很不错，在玩的过程中，身心得到了释放，在这个时候，不会去想工作，感觉不到工作 社会给我的压力，如果天天有这种生活 那有多好啊，可惜玩过以后，要要回到现实生活中，痛苦啊，郁闷啊 ]]> <![CDATA[我的照片]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/夜风来袭/archives/2007/2007426135514.html 夜风来袭 2007-4-26 13:55:00
照片]]> <![CDATA[既然牵手了就不要随便分开]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/夜风来袭/archives/2007/2007426134847.html 夜风来袭 2007-4-26 13:48:00 　　可是女孩因为公司会议而延误了，
　　当她冒著雨赶到的时候已经迟到了30多分钟，
　　他的男朋友很不高兴的说：
　　「你每次都这样，现在我甚么心情也没了，
　　我以後再也不会等你了！
　　刹那间，女孩终於决堤崩溃了，
　　她心里在想：或许，他们再也没有未来了
　　
　　同样的在同一个地点，另一对情侣也面临同样的处境；
　　女孩赶到的时候也迟到了半个钟头，
　　他的男朋友说：「我想你一定忙坏了吧！」
　　接著他为女孩拭去脸上的雨水，并且脱去外套盖在女孩身上，
　　此刻，女孩流泪了
　　但是流过她脸颊的泪却是温馨的。
　　你体会到了吗？
　　
　　其实爱、恨往往只是在我们的一念之间！
　　爱不仅要懂得宽容更要及时，
　　很多事可能只是在於你心境的转变罢了！ 
 ]]> <![CDATA[中年自拍女回应一夜暴红：我不比章子怡差]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/wangying/archives/2007/20074268919.html wangying 2007-4-26 8:09:00   自上周《中年女子自拍挑战章子怡 网友群起支持》一文发布后，引起网友的热烈反响，而事件本身的主角---晴朗阿姨也在一众叫骂与叫好声中意识到，自己一夜间成了网络红人。百感交集的她也不禁在博客中对事件发表了感叹“有人说我‘又一个芙蓉姐姐’”。

    虽说争议声不断，但晴朗阿姨还是发挥了自信的本色。“我没有任何粉饰，我相信如果我的脸经过化妆师简单的处理也会漂亮，不比明星差。”她更表示，积极参加露得清网易明星脸大赛开展的活动没有错，无论结局如何重在参与，她会宽容地接收网友的各种评语。

]]> <![CDATA[黄奕整容成范冰冰[图]]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/wangying/archives/2007/20074268210.html wangying 2007-4-26 8:02:00

一年前的黄奕

现在的黄奕　


范冰冰近照

昨日，一组“小燕子”黄奕出席上海国际车展的照片登在网上。不少网友在评论中表示，黄奕这几张图片完全不像她了，和范冰冰却相很像。影迷对她的长相非常熟悉。虽然她皮肤较黑、鼻头偏大、下巴偏宽，但黄奕仍然是位不折不扣的美女。而在网上的这组图片中，黄奕的脸形和五官都变了样子，只是从眉眼之间依稀能看出来这的确是黄奕。

　　照片出炉后，网友们就“黄奕是否整容”争论得不亦乐乎。在44条与新浪这组图片有关的评论中，有38条评论认为黄奕是整了容，有6条评论则认为，这根本不是黄奕。

　　有网友开玩笑地说：“开了眼角、削了腮骨、垫了下巴、鼻头做了缩小。以我的专业，能看出她做了这几项整形手术。”还有网友戏称，几张照片有的像范冰冰，有的像关之琳，还有的像韩国艺人孙艺珍，可就是不像黄奕。

　　而在另一著名网站天涯上，有细心的网友在贴出图片后，再拿出黄奕之前的照片进行对比，认为黄奕的大鼻头变小了，眼睛开了内眼角、下巴磨尖、丰太阳穴，加高了鼻梁。简宁对“黄奕整容”的说法觉得有些不可思议。“我觉得黄奕长得挺好看的，用不着整吧。整容是老话题了，很久前我们就回应过了。”

　　当记者将图片出处、网友们的评论统统告诉简宁后，简宁表示，自己不知道这是怎么回事，因为没看到照片所以不便回应，其他的要等仔细看过照片以后再说。而事实上，早在记者致电简宁的1个多小时以前，就已经有同行就此事打过电话给他，他当时也是说没看到照片，不便发表意见。

　　作为助理，简宁几乎天天和黄奕呆在一起，尤其是这种工作场合，更是理应一同前往。可对于黄奕有没有整容的事，简宁始终不肯给记者一个肯定的答复。最后，在记者的再三追问下，简宁终于挤出6个字：“我们没有整容。”

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　亚洲小姐包美美

近日浙江女孩包美美却在经纪人的陪同下，专程来到武汉某医疗美容医院，要求整容成“人造范冰冰”。包美美直言：“范冰冰比李湘更红，整容后我比李瑶更有前途！”

 　　包美美现年24岁，身高1.67米，是浙江省东阳市人，去年参加过亚洲小姐网络赛区模仿秀，获得过第二名；参加曲美形象代言人选拔赛，进入了全国20强，还演过一些不出名的电影，目前是武汉某文化传播有限公司的签约艺人。那浙江女孩包美美为什么要舍近求远到湖北整容呢？除开公司在武汉外，包美美给出的答案也令人出乎意料：“我在老家的时候，听一位富豪说武汉有位医学专家曾给范冰冰做过全身抽脂手术。这个专家以前在北京工作，后来回武汉了。他知道范冰冰的身材比例，我就要他按照范冰冰的样子给我吸！”

      人造明星，似乎开辟了一条成名快车道。只要不怕疼，只要你有钱，那就整容成明星吧！值得担忧的是，当满大街都是李湘、范冰冰、刘德华的时候，你习惯吗？为了成名整容成另一个人的模样，这样的行为跟疯狂粉丝杨丽娟又有什么不同呢？

]]> <![CDATA[How to Learn Any Language 1]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/wangying/archives/2007/200742521455.html wangying 2007-4-25 21:45:00 <![CDATA[How to Learn Any Language 2]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/wangying/archives/2007/2007425214433.html wangying 2007-4-25 21:44:00 <![CDATA[How to Learn Any Language 3]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/wangying/archives/2007/200742521445.html wangying 2007-4-25 21:44:00 <![CDATA[How to Learn Any Language 4]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/wangying/archives/2007/2007425214245.html wangying 2007-4-25 21:42:00 Rumours of Russian
When I arrived at the University of North Carolina, I got my first real opportunity to speak the European languages I was learning with native speakers. Students at the university came from many different countries. The Cosmopolitan Club, a group of foreign students and Americans who wanted to meet one another, gathered every Sunday afternoon in the activities building. I felt like a bee flitting from blossom to blossom until it is too heavy with pollen to fly or even buzz.
A rumour rippled across the campus in my senior year that seemed too good to be true. The university, it was whispered, was planning to start a class in Russian.
Sure enough, the rumour was soon confirmed. It was a historic event. Not only was the course the first in Russian ever offered by the University of North Carolina (or possibly by any university in the South), it also represented the first time the university had offered what one student called a “funny looking” language of any kind (he meant languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet)!
The enrollment requirements were stiff. First you had to have completed at least two years in a “normal” language (Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese) with good grades. I qualified and was accepted.
For me the first day of Russian was a lot like the first day of school. I’d toyed with one funny looking language already (Chinese), but I knew Russian was a different kind of funny looking. Would I conquer it, as I had Spanish and Norwegian, or would Russian swallow me whole, as Latin had?
There were forty-five of us in that Russian class thinking varying versions of the same thing when the teacher, a rangy Alabaman named “Tiger” Titus, entered the room. After a formal “Good morning” he went straight to the front of the room and wrote the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet on the blackboard.
You could feel the group’s spirit sink notch by notch as each of Russian’s “funny looking” letters appeared. Students were allowed under university rules to abandon a course and get themselves into another as long as they did it within three days after the beginning of the term. We had defections from Russian class in mid-alphabet. By the
time Tiger Titus turned around to face us, he had fewer students than had entered the room.
“My soul!” exclaimed one of the deserters when I caught up with him at the cafeteria later that day. “I’ve never seen anything like that Russian alphabet before in my life. Why, they’ve got v’s that look like b’s, n’s that look like h’s, u’s that look like y’s, r’s that look like p’s, and p’s that look like sawed off goal posts. They got a backwards n that’s really an e and an x that sounds like you’re gagging on a bone. They got a vowel that looks like the number sixty-one, a consonant that looks like a butterfly with its wings all the way out, and damned if they don’t even have a B-flat!”
The next day there were no longer forty-five members of the university’s first Russian class. There were five.
I was one of the intrepid who hung in.
A Lucky Bounce to the Balkans
Writer/columnist Robert Ruark, a talented North Carolinian and drinking buddy of Ava Gardner, once wrote boastfully about a college weekend that began someplace like Philadelphia and got out of hand and wound up in Montreal. I topped him. I went to a college football game right outside Washington, D.C., one weekend and wound up in Yugoslavia for six weeks!
The previous summer I’d been named a delegate from the university to the national convention of the National Student Association. I came back as chairman for the Virginia-Carolinas region of NSA. In October I was in College Park, Maryland, for the Carolina-Maryland game. At half time, at the hot dog stand, who should be reaching for the same mustard squirter as I but National NSA president, Bill Dentzer.
“Who can believe this?” he said. “We’ve been looking for you for three days!”
I explained it was our big senior out of town football weekend and College Park, Maryland was a long way from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and there was a lot going on and I was sorry he couldn’t reach me. “Why were you looking for me?” I asked.
“We wanted you to go represent us in Yugoslavia,” he said. I told him I’d love to.
“It’s too late now,” he said. “The plane leaves Monday from New York, and it’s already Saturday afternoon and the State Department’s closed, so there’s no way to get you a passport…”
“Bill,” I interrupted, “I have a passport. I can easily get back to Chapel Hill and pick it up in time to fly from New York on Monday.”
By Wednesday I was attending sessions of a spirited Tito propaganda fiesta called the Zagreb Peace Conference and enjoying my first immersion in a language the mere mention of which impresses people even more than Chinese: Serbo-Croatian!
To my delight, I understood entire phrases from it from my university Russian. I became aware of “families” of foreign languages, something that doesn’t occur automatically to Americans because English doesn’t resemble its cousins very closely. It’s something of a black sheep in the Germanic language family. They say the closest language to English is Dutch. Dutch is about as close to English as Betelgeuse is to Baltimore!
I’d noticed the summer before that Norwegian is usefully close to Swedish and Danish. Serbo-Croatian sounded to me like a jazzier, more “fun” kind of Russian. They
use the Roman alphabet in western Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and in Serbia to the east they use the Cyrillic alphabet, with even more interesting letters in it than Russian uses.
Some of the mystique I’d always imputed to multilingual people began to fade. If you meet somebody who speaks, say, ten languages, your instinct is to be impressed to the tune of ten languages worth. If, however, you later learn that six of those languages are Russian, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Polish and Ukrianian – I’m not suggesting that you dismiss him as illiterate, but you ought to be aware that he got six of those languages for the price of about two and three fourths! They’re all members of the Slavic family.
The Yugoslav university students, my hosts, sent me back home aboard a Yugoslav ship, leaving me sixteen days with nothing to do but practice Serbo-Croatian with the other passengers. When I got back to school after a solid eight weeks’ absence, I wasn’t even behind in my German. German is widely spoken in central Europe and I’d spoken it widely enough during the adventure to float almost even with the class.
Exotics – Hard and Easy
Expertise is a narcotic. As knowledge grows, it throws off pleasure to its possessor, much like an interest bearing account throws off money. A pathologist who can instantly spot the difference between normal and abnormal X-rays grows incapable of believing that there are those of us who can’t. I find it hard to believe there are Americans who can’t even tell the difference between printed pages of Spanish and French or of Polish, Danish, or anything else written in the Roman alphabet. Too bad. If you can’t distinguish the easier languages from the harder ones, you miss the higher joys of confronting your first samples of written Finnish.
Finland has been called the only beautiful country in the world where the language is the major tourist attraction. It’s utterly unfamiliar to you no matter where you come from, unless you happen to come from Estonia, in which case Finnish is only half unfamiliar to you. There’s always a general knowledge heavyweight around who says, “Wait a minute. Finnish is related to Hungarian too!”
Oh, yeah! True, Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are indeed all members of the Finno-Ugric language family, but try to find more than six words even remotely similar in each. As you learn more and more about foreign languages, you’re able to laugh at more and more jokes about languages. No Las Vegas comic will even knock socks off, or even loosen them, by standing up and saying, “You know, Finnish and Hungarian are cousin languages, but Finnish took all the vowels!” Look at the two languages side by side, however, and you’ll grudgingly accord at least minor wit status to whoever thought that one up.
You may have experienced the difficulties of tackling Latin and Russian with their half dozen or so noun cases. Finnish has fifteen noun cases in the singular and sixteen in the plural! Every word in the entire language is accented on the first syllable, which gives Finnish something of the sounds of a pneumatic jackhammer breaking up a sidewalk.
I covered the Olympic Games in Helsinki but wisely decided not to try to learn Finnish. It was the wisdom of the young boxer who’s eager to get in there with the champ
and trade punches, but who nonetheless summons up the cool to decline and wait until he’s more prepared. I found a much softer opponent on the ship back to the United States.
A summer tradition that vanished after the 1950’s with far too little poetic lamentation was the “student ship to Europe.” They were almost always Dutch ships offering unbelievably low fares, hearty food, cramped but clean accommodations, cheap beer, and always a bearded guitar player who drew the crowd back to the ship’s fantail after dinner and led the kids of ten or twelve nations in throaty renditions of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” The singing, the flirting, the joy of heading over or heading home, and especially the learning of all the other countries’ “Railroads” in all the other languages made the summer student ship a delight unimaginable to today’s jet lagged young Dutch airmen about my age. They were all headed for the United States to take their jet fighter training at various American air bases, and we became old friends at once. There seemed to be dozens (I later realised hundreds) of Indonesian servants on board. After four hundred years of Dutch rule, Indonesia had won its independence from Holland only four years earlier. The thousands of Indonesians who chose to remain loyal to Holland had to go to Holland, and that meant that virtually the entire Dutch service class was Indonesian.
I was sitting on the deck talking to one of the Dutch pilots, Hans van Haastert. He called one of the Indonesians over and said something to him in fluent Indonesian. My romance with Dutch would begin (in a very unusual way) a few years later, but my romance with Indonesian was born in the lightning and thunder of Hans ordering a beer from that deck chair.
If I had never been drawn to foreign languages earlier, that moment alone would have done it. To me at that time, it was the white suited bwana speaking something pure “jungle” to one of his water carriers in any one of a hundred and eighteen safari movies I’d seen. It was Humphrey Bogart melting a glamourous woman’s kneecaps with a burst of bush talk she had no idea he even knew.
“Where did you learn that?” I asked. It turned out that Hans, like many of his Dutch confreres, had been born in Java of mixed parents. His Indonesian was just as good as his Dutch. “Will you teach me some?” I asked.
For the next eight days, until we were interrupted by the New York City skyline, Hans patiently taught me the Indonesian language. When we parted, I was able to converse with the Indonesian crewmen, just as Hans had that first day on deck. Lest this come across as a boast, let me hasten to point out that Indonesian is the easiest language in the world – no hedging, no “almost”, no “among the easiest”. In my experience, Indonesian is the easiest. The grammar is minimal, regular, and simple. Once I began to learn it, Indonesian didn’t seem “jungle” anymore. The Indonesians obligingly use the Roman alphabet, and they get along with fewer letters of it than we do. And their tongue has an instant charm. The Indonesian word for “sun”, mata hari (the famous female spy was known as the “sun” of Asia) literally means “eye of the day”. When they make a singular noun plural in Indonesia, they merely say it twice. “Man,” for example, is orang. “Men” is orang orang. And when they write it, they just write one orang and put a 2 after it, like an exponent in algebra (Orang 2). Orang hutan, the ape name pronounced by many Americans as if it were “orang-u-tang,” is an Indonesian term meaning “man of the forest.” 

]]> <![CDATA[How to Learn Any Language 5]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/wangying/archives/2007/2007425214222.html wangying 2007-4-25 21:42:00 My Toughest Opponent
For the next four years I avoided taking up any new languages. I had nothing against any of them (except one). It was just that there were too many gaps in the tongues I’d already entertained and I wanted to plug them up.
The language I had something against was Hungarian. Before a summer weekend with army buddies in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I went to the post library and checked out an army phrase book in Hungarian to look at over the weekend. The introduction bluntly warned, “Hungarian is perhaps the hardest language in the world, and it is spoken by only about ten million people.” I resolved I’d never get any closer to it.
Hungarian was the next language I studied.
When Hungary rebelled against Soviet oppression in 1956, I was invited by the U.S. Air Force to join a team of reporters covering Operation Safe Haven, the airlift of all Hungarian refugees who were to receive asylum in the United States. That was far from enough to make me want to study Hungarian – yet.
Every child is treated to fantasies like Buck Rogers and his invincible ray gun, Superman, Batman, or, in my case, Jack Armstrong and his “mystery eye”, a power imparted to him by a friendly Hindu who, merely by concentrating and holding his palms straight out, could stop every oncoming object from a fist to a bullet to a bull to an express train. By this time I began to note that similar powers – offensive and defensive – could unexpectedly and delightfully accompany the mastery of languages.
No Iron Curtains for Language
Many reporters got to the Hungarian border with Austria during the outpouring of refugees that followed the Soviet oppression of the Hungarian freedom fighters. They went to the Red Cross shelters on the Austrian side, interviewed some refugees and relief workers, and went home. I was invited to join a secret team of volunteer international “commandos” who actually slipped into Hungary by night to ferry refugees across the border canal on a rubber raft.
The centre of the refugee operation was the Austrian border village of Andau. I asked a local policeman in German where the refugee headquarters was. It was Christmas night. It was dark. It was cold. There were no tour bus operators on the streets hawking tickets to the Hungarian border. He told me to go to Pieck’s Inn. At Pieck’s Inn the bartender said, “Room nineteen.” The fact that I was getting all this in German without looking around for somebody who spoke English was a convenience, but that’s not what I mean by the power of another language. That came next.
I went upstairs to room nineteen and knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” shouted a voice in interestingly accented English.
“I’m an American newspaper reporter,” I yelled back. “I understand you might help me get to the Hungarian border.”
He opened the door cussing. “I’ll never take another American to the border with us again,” he said before the door even opened. “No more Americans! One of you bastards damned near got us all captured night before last.”
He turned out to be a pleasant looking young man with blonde hair. When I knocked, he was busy adjusting heavy duty combat boots. He continued his tirade as we
faced each other. “That American knew damned good and well that flashlights, flashbulbs, even matches were forbidden.” He went on in rougher language than I’ll here repeat to tell how an American with a camera broke his promise and popped off a flashbulb while a raft load of refugees was in the middle of the canal, causing the refugees and the rescuers on both sides of the canal to scatter. That burst of light, of course, let the Communists know exactly where the escape operation was taking place. He described in valiant but not native English exactly how much ice would have to form around the shell of hell before any other American reporter or any reporter of any kind would ever be invited to join the operation again.
As he railed on, I noticed a Norwegian flag tacked to the wall behind him. “Snakker De norsk?” I asked (“Do you speak Norwegian?”).
He stopped, said nothing for a few seconds. Then, like a Hollywood comic of the 1940’s pulling an absurd reversal, he said, “You’ve got big feet, but there’s a pair of boots on the other side of the bed that might fit you. Try ‘em on!”
All night long we stood there waiting for the shadows to tell us that another group of refugees had arrived on the far bank of the canal. Then we’d push the raft into the water and play out the rope as our two boatmen paddled across. One would get out and help four or five Hungarians into the raft. When the raft was loaded, the boatman still in the raft would tug on the rope and we’d pull it back over. Then the lone boatman would paddle over again and repeat the process until all the refugees were on the Austrian side. The second boatman came back with the last load.
We had to wait at least an hour to an hour and a half between refugee clusters. I was the coldest I’d ever been in my life, and there was no place to huddle behind or curl up inside. All we could do was stand there and wait. Light wasn’t the only thing prohibited. So was talk. Normal speech travels surprisingly far over frozen flatland, and it was important not to betray our position to the Communist patrols. We were only allowed to whisper softly to the person immediately ahead of us on the rope and the person immediately behind.
I tried to remember what day it was. It was Thursday. It had only been the previous Saturday night when I’d taken a Norwegian girl, Heiberg, from Woman’s College to the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we saw newsreels of almost the very spot where I was now standing. When the screen showed Hungarian refugees pouring into Austria, had said, “My sister Karen’s over there somewhere helping those people.” That was all.
The next day I got the call inviting me to fly over with the air force. On Monday I flew. And here I was, freezing and waiting and marvelling at the courage of the boatmen who voluntarily put themselves into jeopardy every time they crossed to the other side of the canal.
Eventually I decided to avail myself of whispering rights. The figure in front of me was so roundly bundled against the cold I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. I leaned forward and said, “My name is Barry Farber and I’m from America.”
A woman’s voice replied, “My name is Karen Heiberg and I’m from Norway.”
The cold, the power of the coincidence, and the tension of the border all combined to keep me from maximising that opportunity. All I managed to do was flatfootedly utter the obvious: “I took your sister to the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, five nights ago.”
The effect on Karen was powerful. I can’t complain, but I wish I’d been quick enough to add, “She sent me over here to find out why you never write Uncle Olaf!”

]]> <![CDATA[How to Learn Any Language 6]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/wangying/archives/2007/2007425214158.html wangying 2007-4-25 21:41:00 How I Married Hungarian
You don’t launch into the study of a new language casually, but it’s not quite as solemn a decision as an American man proposing to his girlfriend after an evening of wine and light jazz. It is, however, something like an Ottoman sultan deciding to take on another wife. It really is like a marriage. Something in you actually says, “I do!” and you decide to give it time and commitment that would ordinarily be invested elsewhere.
My pledge never to try to learn Hungarian was shattered by Hungarian heroism, Soviet tanks, and my agreeing to help Hungarian refugees resettle in Greensboro. I wasn’t the only journalist who stayed on that story long after history moved on. Every journalist I know who got involved in any part of the Hungarian Revolution became attached to it.
I started in Munich in the transit refugee camp for those fleeing Hungarians who were destined to go to America. I buzzed from one refugee to another like a bee to blossoms, drawing as many words and phrases as I could from each and writing them down.
The U.S. Air Force gave its Luitpol barracks over to the Hungarians, who promptly plastered their own signs right on top of the English signs on all the doors. The door that once said “Doctor” suddenly said “Orvos.” The door that once said “Clothing” suddenly said “Ruha.” And so on. It was easy to tell who among the Americans and Germans at Luitpol were genuine language lovers. They were the ones who were not annoyed.
The Hungarian relabelling of everything at Luitpol actually gave me my most explosive language learning thrill. When I went searching for a men’s room, I found myself for the first time in my life not knowing where to go. You don’t need Charles Berlitz to take you by the hand to the right one when the doors read “Mesdames” and “Messieurs,” “Damen” and “Herren,” “Se?oras” and “Se?ores,” or even the rural Norwegain “Kvinnor” and “Menn.”
No such luck prevailed at Luitpol. The two doors were labelled “N??k” and “Férfiak.” I looked at those two words, trying not to let my language lover’s enthusiasm distract from the pragmatic need to decipher which one was which relatively soon.
My thinking went like this. The k at the end of both words probably just made them plural. That left N?? and Férfia, or possibly Férfi. Something came to me. I remembered reading that Hungarian was not originally a European language. It had been in Asia. The Chinese word for “woman”, “lady”, or anything female was n? – not no and not nu, but that precise umlaut sound that two dots over anything foreign almost always represents. (I lose patience with language textbooks that spend a page and a half telling you to purse your lips as though you’re going to say oo as in “rude” and then tell you instead to say ee as in “tree.” If you simply say the e sound in “nervous” or “Gertrude,” you’ll be close enough.
Following that hunch I entered the door marked “F?rfiak.” The joy that came next should arise in tabernacles, not men’s rooms. To my satisfaction and relief I walked in and found five or six other férfiak inside!
Back in America I went looking for some books and records (there were no cassette tapes in those days) to help me in Hungarian. There were none. Communist rule has so completely cut Hungary off from the West that when you went looking for a Hungarian book, the shelves of even the biggest bookstores leapfrogged Hungarian, jumping right from Hebrew to Indonesian. There was one Hungarian-English phrase book published by a New York Hungarian delicatessen and general store named Paprikas Weiss. To accommodate the wave of Hungarian immigrants who had come to America in the 1930’s, they had published their own little phrase book, which was distinguished by its utter failure to offer a single phrase of any practical use whatsoever to those of us working with the refugees. It was loaded with sentences like Almomban egy bet??r??vel viaskodtom,” which means, “In my dream I had a fight with a burglar”!
Finally, like supplies that lag far behind the need for them in wartime, some decent English-Hungarian/Hungarian-English dictionaries arrived – no grammar books yet, just dictionaries. An explorer named Vilhjalmur Stefansson went to Greenland one time and proved you could live for eighteen months on nothing but meat. I proved it was possible, with nothing but that dictionary, to resettle half a dozen Hungarian refugees who spoke no English at all in Greensboro, North Carolina, to care for all their needs, and have a good deal of fun without one single bit of grammar!
Hungarian has one of the most complex grammars in the world, but grammar is like classical music and good table manners. It’s perfectly possible to live without either if you’re willing to shock strangers, scare children, and be viewed by the world as a rampaging boor. We had no choice. Hungarians had to be talked to about homes, jobs, training, money, driver’s licenses, and the education of their children.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to the butcher’s,” for instance, had to do without the thirty-nine grammatical inflections a Hungarian sentence of that length would properly entail. We did it with nothing but the translation of essential words: “Tomorrow go meat fellow.” “A charitable woman is coming by to help you with your furniture needs” became “Nice lady come soon give tables chairs.”
I learned Hungarian fluently – and badly. Many years later I decided to return to Hungarian and learn it properly and grammatically. It’s a little like being back in Latin class, but this time I have a much better attitude.
New Friends
For the next thirty-five years I stood my ground and resisted taking up any new language. The languages I’d studied up to that point included Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portugese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese (Mandarin dialect), Indonesian, Hungarian, Finnish, Yiddish and Hebrew. I happily applied myself to building competence in those languages and turning a deaf ear to all others.
It was tempting to tackle Greek; so many Greeks I could have practiced with were popping up in my daily travels, but I clung to my policy of “No more languages, thank you!” That policy was misguided; in fact, swine headed. I was like the waiter standing there with arms folded who gets asked by a diner if he knows what time it is and brusquely replies “Sorry. That’s not my table!”
I could have easily and profitably picked up a few words and phrases every time I went to the Greek coffee shop and in the process learned another major language. But I didn’t. In the 1980’s immigrants to New York, where I lived, began to pour in from unaccustomed corners of the world, adding languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Farsi, Bengali, Pashtu, Twi, Fanti, Wollof, Albanian, and Dagumbi to our already rich inventory of Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Yiddish, Portugese, Greek, Polish, and Hebrew. I abandoned the policy. Now I want to learn them all – not completely, just enough to delight the heart of an Indian or African cab driver who never before in his entire life met an American who tried to learn his language.

]]> <![CDATA[新闻出版总署拟起草互联网出版管理条例]]> http://blog.0576city.com/0576city/wangying/archives/2007/2007426164837.html wangying 2007-4-26 16:48:00 　　徐静蕾的网络杂志《开啦》上周正式上线，徐静蕾请来王朔、韩寒、周点点等大牌开设专栏，好不热闹。而王朔此前也曾有言，相比要经常忍受作品被出版社责编删改，他更愿意把作品发在网上，尤其是徐静蕾的网站上，因为这样更可以畅所欲言。不过现在看来，王朔这张大嘴又不能乱说了。

　　不过，许多创办网络杂志的名人对此还知之甚少。记者昨天下午联系到徐静蕾的经纪人刘璇。听到记者的转述，刘小姐的口吻很迷惑：“我们没有看到这个条例要出台的新闻，也不知道这件事情。”而至于是否会有应对举措，刘小姐也以“正在开车”为由，拒绝回答。

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